Mark Rober is an engineer and an inventor who makes science videos for YouTube. He earned degrees in mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University and the University of Southern California, then joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2004. He calls the laboratory "Disneyland for engineers" and says he heard about the job opening from a professor who had just presented research there. He spent nine years there as a mechanical engineer, and seven of those years were on the team for Curiosity, a rover that went to Mars.

A NASA-wide wiki that Rober worked on at JPL to capture and share information won him one of NASA's top internal honors. Tech Times says he was one of the primary architects of JPL Wired and published a case study on using wiki technology in a high-tech organization to capture corporate knowledge. His former JPL boss said that many engineering designers like their comfort zone, but Rober was always looking to improve his skills and help others.

A BYU professor said that some engineers want to grind through problem after problem on paper, while Rober also wanted to make and produce things, and that this passion was what made him a mold breaker. A BYU mechanical engineering professor said Rober is leading more people into developing engineering skills, an effect that could be huge over time. Rober says he is driven by the aha moments he had in physics class, when something just clicked, and that being an engineer means you can just will something into existence.

At JPL, Rober worked on the Descent Stage of the Curiosity mission, which TED describes as the jet pack that lowered the rover to the surface, and on some hardware on the rover's top deck for collecting samples. He worked on rover arms and descent-stage jet packs while also earning a master's degree from the University of Southern California and volunteering on other JPL projects. In 2012, Gizmodo reported that he joined JPL seven years earlier, started work on Curiosity right away and was responsible for the design of a part that would be important during the science part of the mission.

NASA says Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and was the largest robot ever to land on another planet at that time. It landed in Gale Crater, a crater with a tall mountain in the middle, whose many layers of rock are made of different minerals from different time periods. NASA describes Curiosity as car-size and about as tall as a basketball player, with a 7-foot-long arm that places tools close to rocks selected for study.

NASA says Curiosity set out to answer whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support small life forms called microbes. NASA says that early in the mission, the rover's scientific tools found chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments on Mars. It also says Curiosity drilled a rock that was once mud at the bottom of a lake, and that the results helped scientists learn that Gale Crater had ingredients ancient life would have needed to survive.

Rober made sand act like a liquid with a process called a fluidized bed: when the right amount of air moves through the sand, it flows like a liquid, and when the air stops, it turns solid again. He could not find instructions for the sand pool he imagined, so he read industrial patents for ideas, and the industrial designs he studied showed many small air holes rather than one large inlet. He tinkered with the number and spacing of the holes until his design worked, and he turned sand into liquid after 25 attempts. Every project he builds has mishaps and dead ends along the way, and the builds are harder than his short build montages make them look.

Rober built an automatic bull's-eye dartboard that predicts where a dart will land and moves itself in half a second to guarantee a perfect shot, and it took him three and a half years to build. To build it, he trained six stepper motors to respond to six infrared cameras and a motion-capture system. He also built a decoy package with four phone cameras inside that records what happens when it is opened, and CNET described the invention as having an Arduino micro-controller on a custom circuit board that directs four smartphones to record, whichever side the package is opened from. He says he loves to take something commonplace and reuse it in ridiculous and original ways.

Rober has given a TED talk called The Super Mario Effect about learning from failure, and a TED page says that when 50,000 of his three million subscribers took part in a basic coding challenge, the data pointed to what he calls the Super Mario Effect. He says to treat failure like losing a level in a video game: try again and figure out how to beat the level.

In June 2023, Rober gave the main speech at the MIT graduation. MIT's commencement committee chair said that Rober's gift for making complex ideas relevant and fun has helped public understanding of science and STEM education. The chair added that his technical expertise, with an extraordinary talent for communication, lets him show the practical power of science and engineering. Rober showed his advice to engage in occasional playful anarchy by having a drone fly his graduation cap up instead of throwing it. His second piece of advice to the graduates was to frame their failures in a positive light, as something to learn from.

At TED2026, in April 2026, Rober said that a video about the scientific method would be boring, but a video about a 15-ton Jell-O pool you can bellyflop onto can sneak in all six steps of the scientific method. He also says he hides the science like vegetables: kids click on a fun video, and the science comes along with it.

In 2013, CNN reported that Rober had quit his job as a mechanical engineer at NASA and started Digital Dudz, a company making costumes that integrate tablets and smartphones. He sold the company to Morphsuits in 2013 and worked at Morphsuits for two years. In 2017, the Orange County Register wrote that he had helped drive the Science Channel show The Quick And The Curious and made more than 50 educational YouTube videos. He also worked at Apple on product design in its Special Projects group. In 2018, CNBC and Variety reported from patent filings that he had been helping Apple develop virtual reality for entertainment in self-driving cars, and while working at Apple, he kept making YouTube videos as a fun, creative outlet. He left his job at Apple in 2019 to make that outlet, his YouTube channel, his full-time work.

Rober said that most people quit their day jobs at 250,000 YouTube subscribers, but he liked his job and kept it as long as he could. At TED2026, in April 2026, he said he had uploaded a free science or engineering video to YouTube once a month for 15 years. As of December 2022, MIT said his channel had 23 million subscribers and more than 3 billion views. In September 2021, the Institution of Engineering and Technology described him as having over 18 million subscribers, and as of April 2026, Goodgoodgood described him as a NASA engineer turned YouTube sensation with over 75 million subscribers. In 2021, the Institution made him an Honorary Fellow for his contribution to aerospace engineering.

Rober and the YouTuber MrBeast started Team Trees, launched in 2019 with the Arbor Day Foundation. In 2021, Variety reported that it set out to raise $20 million to plant 20 million trees and brought in more than $23 million, and the Team Trees website said, as of November 2026, that the project had reached 25 million trees. They also started Team Seas to clean up trash from oceans, rivers and beaches, and Rober said half the money from Team Seas would fund Ocean Cleanup's "50-ton trash-eating robot" barges that collect garbage in rivers that flow into oceans.

Rober started CrunchLabs, a company that makes kits for kids to build things and learn about engineering. CrunchLabs says its engineering factory is a real place in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, and that its packaging is compostable. It wants kids to learn to think like an engineer, and it says it does not think there is a STEM talent shortage but an inspiration shortage.

Class CrunchLabs gives teachers science lessons for free, and The Times of India reported in June 2026 that it is a science curriculum designed for students in grades 3 through 8. One unit, called Carnival of Collisions, introduces students to force, motion and collisions through activities and experiments. In 2026, Rober said that he and CrunchLabs had invested about $60 million in building the curriculum, and Goodgoodgood reported that the first round of units were available online in 2026. Rober said that 95 percent of the teachers who taught pilot lessons said they wanted Class CrunchLabs to be their full science curriculum. He said that in the program the teacher becomes the hero by engaging students in real science and engineering they care about. Rober said his dream job is ultimately to be a middle school science teacher.

Words to know

• microbes: small life forms
• Curiosity: a Mars rover
• wiki: a sharing site
• curriculum: science lessons